France says AZERTY keyboards fail French typists

"Almost impossible” to write correctly in French with a French keyboard, officials say.

If you’ve done some world traveling, you may know the frustration of sitting down in an Internet cafe, expecting to type out a message, only to realize that the keys on the computer’s keyboard are nothing like the ones from your home country. That quick e-mail to mom just became a hunt-and-peck chore that will send you back to the cafe’s counter a couple of times to re-up the reservation at your terminal.

This week, France’s culture and communication ministry acknowledged that residents of the country faced similar frustrations when using different keyboards within their own country, a problem the ministry said it would begin trying to solve. In a statement released this week, the ministry lamented the fact that French keyboards, which use the AZERTY layout rather than the QWERTY layout familiar to English speakers, make it unnecessarily difficult to type common symbols and letters. While the 26 letters of the alphabet as well as common accented letters like é, à, è, and ù are generally represented similarly on an AZERTY keyboard, the ministry said that the @ symbol and the € symbol are inconveniently or inconsistently placed, as are commands to capitalize symbols like "ç".

The trouble of finding how to properly capitalize accented letters is a big issue in written French, especially for legal texts and government documents where every letter of the names of people and businesses are capitalized. Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words. A report from the ministry asserted that the "hardware limitations" of the French AZERTY keyboard "have even led some of our fellow citizens to think that we should not accentuate capital letters.”

Equally, certain idiosyncrasies of the French language are lost on French language keyboards, leading French speakers to adopt more anglicized ways of writing. The key for the ligature "œ” is inconsistent or non-existent among keyboards in France, although it’s the symbol traditionally used to write words like “œufs” (eggs) or “œuvre” (work). While anyone would understand that the word spelled “oeufs” is actually “œufs,” the ministry is opposed to such concessions.

Similarly, AZERTY keyboards rarely allow easy or obvious access to the symbols that French writing uses for quotation marks (« ») forcing writers to use the English quotations we’re familiar with.

The French culture and communication ministry admitted that software can often overcome the limitations of the physical keyboard, and autocorrect goes a long way in helping French writers add accents to capital letters. But autocorrect isn’t a panacea, and the rules of the language would be better preserved with a standardized keyboard, the ministry argued. “It is almost impossible to write in French correctly with a keyboard marketed in France,” the ministry wrote.

Regional languages that fall under France’s domain—like Occitan, Catalan, Breton, and Polynesian—are also too hard to type, the ministry said, citing the absence of keys for an assortment of symbols unique to those languages.

The next step to a standardized keyboard, the ministry said, would be for France’s standards organization AFNOR (or the Association Française de Normalisation) to study the best layout for a French-language keyboard. The deadline for a proposed layout would be this summer.

The layout will almost certainly still adhere to France’s current AZERTY layout, but a Dvorak-based alternative called BÉPO has supporters and was cited in the culture ministry’s report.

Below we take a look at the wide variety of keyboards offered in many languages, standard and non-standard.

The most common French layout you'll see today.

Keys on BÉPO keyboards are placed based on statistical and ergonomic studies to reduce hand movement while typing.

While you'll mostly find QWERTY keyboards in Turkey, the Turkish F-keyboard is an interesting layout. It was invented in 1955 and placed keys in such a way to make typing in Turkish as efficient as possible.